Horizon Deal Supports Boehringer Ingelheim Drug Discovery

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Horizon Discovery has signed a five-year research service collaboration agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim. Horizon will support Boehringer’s oncology programs by using its Discovery Toolbox for research projects and profiling of compounds at the hit-to-lead, lead optimization, and pre-clinical stages to elucidate their anticancer properties and help guide drug discovery programs.

Horizon will evaluate compounds across a broad panel of X-MAN isogenic models and selected 2D/3D phenotypic assays, and will provide an FTE and access to its custom cell-line generation services to support the programs.

Horizon will also apply its genome editing technology GENESIS™ to develop human isogenic disease model cell lines, according to Boehringer Ingelheim’s specifications. Using GENESIS, Horizon is able to alter any endogenous gene sequence of human or mammalian cell lines quickly, reliably, and without unwanted and confounding genotypes and/or phenotypes. The resulting cell lines accurately model the disease-causing mutations found in patients.

Last year, Horizon granted American Type Culture Collection a license to distribute a select set of its X-Man isogenic cell lines to academic and nonprofit customers for noncommercial research applications. In November 2012, the company inked a gene-editing research collaboration with the Institute of Neurology, University College London, providing access to GENESIS.